Menu

Category Archives: C#

I tripped up on a strange quirk working with the Image and ImageFormat classes recently. The intention was simple – load an Image object from an existing graphic, generate a thumbnail, and save it out in the original format. The Image class in .NET includes a handy “RawFormat” property indicating the correct format to save out in. So far, so easy. Except the object that RawFormat was returning didn’t seem to match any supported ImageFormat, and the Guid was one character out. For example, when loading a JPEG, you got:

b96b3caa-0728-11d3-9d7b-0000f81ef32e

when the Guid for ImageFormat.Jpeg.Guid was in fact

b96b3cae-0728-11d3-9d7b-0000f81ef32e

It turns out that the “RawFormat” seems to change to an internal format the moment you start modifying the original image. So the simple trick is to save the value of the RawFormat property first, do your modifications, and then save out the image using the original RawFormat value.

First, you need to get an access token that your windows service or app can permanently use. You can get this by visiting the following url (all on one line), replacing [ApiKey] with your applications Facebook API key.

In the parameters of the URL you get redirected to, this will give you an access key. Note however, that this only gives you an access key to post to your own profile page. Next, you need to get a separate access key to post to the specific page you want to access. To do this, go to

You can find your user id in the URL when you click on your profile image. On this page, you will then see a list of page IDs and corresponding access tokens for each facebook page. Using the appropriate pair,you can then use code like this:

Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t have the same support for app.config files in the way that their web projects do, in order to vary connection strings and other configuration settings for different release modes – a real shame. You can vote on the issue here. In the meantime though, the ASP.NET team have a fix, detailed here.

All you need to do is save their custom targets file, add an imports tag immediately before the closing tag:

(note you don’t need to do this on the configuration specific config files such as app.release.config). Then you can write your app.Release.config and similar files in the same way you do for web.config files. Sweet!